It’s not the nanny state that should alarm us, it’s the gluttonous food industry giants
Don’t be so fucking stupid! Really, that is the most cretinous thing you could say. What part of force and choice do these morons not understand? I can choose what food I put in my basket when shopping. I can choose how much I buy. I can decide for myself whether I buy fresh, frozen or put the odd sweet treat in. I cannot choose when the state enforces its will. Huge fucking difference.
But then, this is the Guardian where vile authoritarians have wet dreams over sending those guilty of wrong-think to the gulags.
More than 5,000 calories. According to one survey of festive habits, that’s the order of what the average person consumes on Christmas Day. Many of us will apparently have downed a day’s worth of calories before we even sit down for the main event.
So fucking what? None of your concern. It’s one fucking day in the year. Fuck off!
So it was with impeccably guilt-inducing timing that the Telegraph splashed a story across its front page on Boxing Day morning about the restaurant and ready meal “calorie caps” that are supposedly about to be introduced. Cue shrill tabloid columns about the nanny-state calorie police curbing our right to stuff our faces. “These demands are worthy of Nero or Caligula,” lamented the folk over at rightwing thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs. And it gave cabinet minister Liz Truss the chance to crack a joke. “I’m too busy eating #leaveusalone #boxingday,” she tweeted. Ho-ho-ho.
The IEA is right. It’s no one else’s concern what we eat or how much we eat. There is no place in a civilised society for calorie caps imposed by an authoritarian government. None whatsoever.
But overeating is no laughing matter.
So don’t overeat, then. No one is being force-fed.
Sure, overindulging for a couple of days a year isn’t going to kill anyone…
So there isn’t a problem that needs solving then.
…but the excess calories some of us take on day in, day out are more worrying.
Only if you are a prodnosed busybody who thinks it is okay to poke about in other people’s eating habits. If it is worrying, it is a worry confined to those who do it and no one else.
The figures are less spectacular than the Christmas Day gorgefest, but they add up: on average, men aged 31-60 consume 285 excess calories a day.
Made up junk from PHE.
This is fuelling a public health crisis.
No. It. Isn’t.
One in three children leaves primary school overweight or obese. We’re the most obese nation in western Europe, and the sixth fattest in the OECD, with obesity levels rising even faster than in the US.
More junk science from the ministry of made-up statistics. They use BMI (a useless measure at the best of times) and have been moving the bar down for some time now. Meanwhile, the vast majority of ordinary people are not obese and being a bit overweight is not a health problem. This is manufactured hysteria designed to justify more pettifogging interference in our lives and an excuse to raise more tax to pay for the sinecures of the parasites who create these scares.
Obesity is second only to smoking as a cause of preventable deaths and costs the NHS more than £6.1bn a year.
Ah, yes, let’s wheel out the smoking bogeyman. I wouldn’t be surprised if these creatures blamed obesity on fourth-hand smoking. Oh, and the made-up figure of £6.1bn… Smokers – like drinkers – pay a significant amount more in taxes than those who do not indulge, but let’s not allow such matters to muddy the waters, eh?
If anything, the proposed approach by Public Health England doesn’t go far enough
Thus speaks the authoritarian despot.
Despite the Telegraph’s best attempts to whip up outrage, there aren’t going to be any compulsory restrictions on food manufacturers.
And nor should there be. We have free choice in what foods we buy and that should remain the case. There is no place for the state to be involved here.
Rather, the approach is voluntary; the food industry as a whole will be set targets to reduce average calories by 20% for convenience foods such as pizzas by 2024, with the vague threat of unspecified tougher action if they don’t act.
Even this is too far. It is no one else’s business. The state needs to fuck off out of it.
What the Telegraph got its hands on was the set of calorie guidelines, not caps, which food manufacturers are being consulted about, likely to change before they get published.
And the food industry needs to be robust in telling these prodnoses where they can stick their guidelines.
“What about our free will?” the anti-nanny-staters will cry at the idea of forcing manufacturers to act. But we don’t see people with placards in the street protesting against the thwarting of our right to eat a slice of bread with as much salt as a packet of crisps. The beauty of food reformulation is that because it happens gradually, our palates adjust and we simply don’t notice that certain foods are 30% less salty than a decade ago.
And this is how you boil a frog, ladies and gentlemen. From the words of the nanny statist. Oh, and for the record, I have noticed the lack of taste in foods with lower salt and sugar. I counter this by putting it back in when preparing it for the table, just as I sprinkle some salt into a bag of crisps.
“…I sprinkle some salt into a bag of crisps…”
Interesting. Months ago, I bought a box of those individual little packs of salt to carry around in my van!
Let the people in the Palace of Westminster, Public Health, and the Grundiag, show us the way by having all their restaurants provide only calorie reduced meals, for a specific period, say 6 months, and then publish the findings of how much weight the grossly obese have lost. This survey would obviously include a ‘No alcohol’ policy as these drinks are laden with calories. If they are not prepared to lead the way, as you have so succinctly put it, “they can fuck off!”
Did anyone see the PHE approved Xmas dinner that popped up over the festive period? I think it might have been the Independant. It was a pretty funny piss take but should perhaps be taken as a warning as to what you can expect if these people get their way.
@Stonyground
About time DM did a Project Veritas style sting on MPs and PHE to reveal them in and out of work. I’d love footage of PHE board at their homes on Christmas Day.
I’d bet none had anything like this Gov’t Approved Christmas Meal
It was the Express, sorry I don’t know how to post a link from my phone.
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/896228/christmas-lunch-food-healthy-guidelines-sprouts-public-health-england-taxpayers-alliance
This is from last year.
I always add salt back to our modern ‘lighly salted’ crisps. Or if we holiday in France we stock up at a french supermarket where they seem to still sell crisps that taste more like crisps than our cardboard ones.
@LR
Spot on and after you’ve bought you can choose when and if you eat or throw away what you own.
I buy a large variety of food to allow me to choose what to eat or satiate a craving (sardines @ 2200 once). Eat, store or throw – my food. Am I fat? No.
imo fat problem is down to state removing self-responsibility. More state control always their answer, like more EU – ignore and double-down with failure.
Of course, no mention is made of the relevance to families of old, scrimping and saving to make a decent meal for their children, with plenty of vegetables, cheap cuts of meat or offal, puddings with some old fruit saved from the autumn and pickles from the veg crop.
Christmas Dinner was the treat of the year, and quite rightly so. The Christian ethic of feeding a family with limited means far outshines the pompous snobbishness of mindless quangos.
Accurate summary